The Sooty Empiric

As mentioned before , I have been following the Heidegger scandal from afar. In short, it's apparent that Heidegger's Naziism runs deep. As far as I can tell, the scholarly discussion after the publication of the Black Notebooks has largely resulted in acceptance of the claim that his Naziism is not so easily divorced from aspects of his thinking that people have wanted to take up and incorporate into their own work. The hard task of seeing what can be disentangled and how thus begins in earnest! Well, recently, a tweet , a book review , and a blog post , have all got me thinking more about this. In the below I am going to outline a thought I have discussed in conversation with a few people but never run past people who I think know enough about Heidegger or the present scholarly debate on his work to really have it tested. Like my first blog post on this (first link!) it's very much an outsider's perspective, which means it runs a high risk of being either so obvious...

When I was 14 my mother died. By this point I was rather a bookish child, and so my instinct was to turn to some text and find solace therein. My faith made the choice of text obvious, but, still, the Bible is a big book containing many literary mansions; what to read therein? What I ended up settling on was the Book of Job --  I read and reread this text, and for some time could quote lengthy passages from the Authorised Version off by heart. No stranger to teenage melodrama, I found myself really identifying with Job's dignified resolve in the face of a fundamentally unfair and (to him) inexplicable cruelty. It brought me comfort to think that I might hope in my own way to exemplify the same sort of courage, to squarely face tragedy as tragedy, yet never give in to the temptation to simply curse God and die. However, some years later when somebody else I knew was faced with their own loss, I recommended reading Job to them - but they found this perverse, utter...